But IntelligentM and it’s ilk are just another example of how employers and maybe even governments will use connectivity plus sensors for surveillance. The question then becomes, how much of our privacy are we willing to trade for the benefits of lowering infections in a hospital setting, or catching criminals or even improving traffic safety by monitoring cars?

The IntelligentM bracelet contains RFID tags and an accelerometer and can track when, where and how well a doctor washes his or her hands. The bracelet vibrates, for example, to let the doctor know when their hand washing effort is sufficient.

The RFID tags interact with receivers near the sinks and at the doors of patient’s rooms to communicate with the bracelet. The data collected is uploaded at the end of the shift. Because the IntelligentM bracelet relies on RFID, it is somewhat less intrusive, tracking hand washing at sinks and at the doors to patient rooms, as opposed to the real-time movements of the doctor around the hospital.

However, these bracelets are part of a larger shift of monitoring workers to ensure compliance with company procedures and perhaps ensuring productivity. For example, the Wall Street Journal recently wrote about how some employers are using physical trackers placed on employees and around the office from a company called Sociometrics to track how people move around and interact.

And last March at our Structure:Data conference my colleague Mathew Ingram got into a debate with the CEO of Cataphoroa, which analyzes employee emails, IMs and other electronic messages for risky or illegal behavior. But instead of looking for trigger words, the company’s software mines the entire text to understand the “digital tone” of the employee. That data can be used to prevent risk, but also search for the company’s “best” managers.

And that’s the rub in many of these cases: more information — as long as it’s interpreted accurately — will benefit those who perform well or fit within the norms of the group. However, those using the data have their own norms and value judgments they bring to the analysis, which puts the scrutinized at risk. It’s hard to argue with promoting hand washing in hospitals. However if that same data sees a doctor going into a patient room more times than the hospital’s best practices call for to talk to a patient, then that same doctor might get penalized.

The courts have thus far been fine with employers monitoring employee email and communications in the workplace, but not with requiring a password to someone’s Facebook account. As more and more sensor-based surveillance occurs we’re going to need to new rights for employees, especially around employers applying their morals and norms to the workplace.

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(c) 2012 Pinar Ozger. pinar@pinarozger.com

Your corporation is watching you, and it might be using Cataphora’s software, which mines employees emails, IMs and other electronic communications to determine how big of a risk a corporation might face from one bad apple.

Calling it software that can detect “people who are weird along many different dimensions,” Elizabeth Charnock CEO of Cataphora, claimed that the software isn’t intruding on an employee’s rights to privacy, because that right can’t really exist in today’s office environment where 90 percent to 95 percent of employer communication is electronic, and thus hidden to managers.

She compared today’s environment to a few decades past, when office workers would have to send communication in open mailers that passed through the mailroom and talk on phone calls in earshot of many other people. But today, someone can’t manage by walking around and trying to overhear problems. Now those problems have migrated to Facebook and email, so it makes sense that managers follow them there, she said.

“When we do hear people call it creepy, it’s a result of people being misinformed. Seventy percent of companies monitor employees electronics communications,” Charnock said.

Cataphora doesn’t just monitor those communications, however. The technology helps them filter those conversations and establish the digital tone of an employee, which is slightly different from looking for triggering keywords in an email or IM conversation. Charnock said this tool, like any tool, can be used for an employee’s benefit. She cited the example of a French company that is using it to help determine who the best managers are, despite that organization having a bunch of regional offices with few employees. There, now don’t you feel better?

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It’s about more (and less) than wide-scale fraud

To get a full sense for where Charnock sees the value of her company’s software, which tracks and analyzes electronic communications carried out over corporate networks, one really needs to read a Cataphora blog post called “Getting Big Brother Right.” You’ll notice in a hurry that while Cataphora is concerned with uncovering nefarious activity such as fraud and with discovering the truth in the case of any complaints, investigations or lawsuits, it’s also quite adept at proactively tracking and highlighting employees’ personal lives if their bosses are so inclined. It’s the latter type of activity that I think toes some ethical lines, and it’s on this issue that Charnock and I began a recent conversation.

Elizabeth Charnock

To defend the tracking of employees’ personal lives, Charnock points to the scenario of someone “flipping out.” Maybe someone is going through an ugly divorce, she explained, or is otherwise very stressed out and could be a danger to himself, to others or to the bottom line by operating heavy machinery or sensitive equipment. Those issues might not be visible to the naked eye, but they might be clearer in someone’s emails. If a company gets “sued out of existence” or faces a large civil judgment or regulatory fine, everyone loses, especially if the result is a wave of layofffs or bankruptcy.

Or, she said, consider today’s distributed workforces in which employees are spread across multiple offices or even are working from home. In the past, Charnock said, managers could see their employees on a daily basis and might be able to put two and two together if, say, the guy who came in looking hungover every morning was also an unproductive employee. That’s not always possible today, but Cataphora can help replace those in-person interactions if that same guy is emailing co-workers about his wild nights or tweeting about them from his office desktop.

The aforementioned blog, written by Cataphora VP of Marketing Rick Janowski, takes a more positive tack on this type of monitoring:

At least some level of protective monitoring helps to replace the basic kinds of feedback that managers are used to having readily available, whether that is seeing an employee with a runny nose and concluding they have a cold or seeing a normally calm person pacing around their office and inferring that they are having some kind of issue. Such knowledge helps managers make better decisions in the day-to-day management of their employees.

But this is where we get into the proverbial slippery slope. Even if you can buy into what Charnock is proposing as simply being good business and really just serving as an electronic proxy for a floor manager, you have to wonder where it stops. Where is the line at which companies decide particular information isn’t important enough to warrant monitoring and/or acting upon?

What really matters?

Charnock says she doesn’t care about whether someone is looking at Facebook, but rather cares about uncovering broad and worsening problems, or acute but intensifying problems. She also suggested that sometimes it’s in companies’ best interests to know as little as possible about their employees’ personal lives. If personal details about, for example, sexual orientation were included in an employee’s email, evidence that the company knew about them might play an important role in a wrongful termination lawsuit.

The problem, of course, is that while Charnock as a third party selling software can take a seemingly prudent stance toward monitoring, petty or overly draconian employers might not be able to draw those lines. They might equate Facebook usage with being unproductive on the company dime. Maybe they’ll find it acceptable to monitor discussions about employees’ health so they can pressure them to get in shape. Hey, it’ll mean lower insurance premiums for the company and everyone else.

But maybe there’s no problem at all with employers monitoring what their employees are doing. Maybe employees should just stop conducting personal conversations using company email accounts, computers and cell phones. The law is on the employers’ side — at least within reason — and, to some degree, so is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Charnock said she and EFF boardmember Brad Templeton are friends, and the EFF’s main concern is that employees know when they enter the workplace that they’re communications are not free from prying eyes.

And with that, the issue of workplace privacy converges with the issue of consumer privacy. Are clear disclosures of tracking practices and informed consent all that matter, after which anything is fair game? Or do we want to guarantee a minimum of rights regardless what the technology enables and the contract stipulates? That’s a question I don’t suspect we’ll have an answer to anytime soon.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user kissmygrandmother.

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You may have a sense of who you routinely ignore when they send email or a meeting request, versus whose messages you usually pay close attention to, but a company called Cataphora wants to give you an even more close-up view of the external face you show to people, via a new program it calls Digital Mirror. The software pulls in your email and calendar info (Outlook only, for now, although the company says it is planning to add support for other email clients) and then gives you a dashboard with a variety of filters through which you can view your communications with the outside world.

Elizabeth Charnock, the CEO of Cataphora — a mathematician who worked at Hewlett-Packard (hpq) and Sun Microsystems before starting the company in 2002 — says that the Digital Mirror software creates a picture of “The Digital You,” and that this can often be different from the way you perceive yourself:

The Digital You is a complex mosaic of habit, subconscious acts of both omission and commission, and premeditated presentations. [It] can behave quite differently from the real you. The Digital You may be more aggressive or sneakier or funnier, for example.

The software, which you can download and install, has a pane that shows you your “quality time” — a pie-chart graph that illustrates when you tend to write longer messages in response to others, and how much time you spend in meetings with various contacts — and one that looks at who you contact the most in a variety of ways and illustrates it as a “social you-niverse,” with different people in your social circle represented as planets in different orbits around you. There’s a box chart that shows who you’ve talked to recently about what topics, and there are some interesting graphs that use semantic analysis of your emails to show you the topics that caused you to respond negatively, including the people who sent you the emails in question.

But the features in the Digital Mirror dashboard that look like the most fun are the ones that look at things like “buck passing” behavior — examining your emails to see who regularly asks you for advice on things that may not be your area of responsibility — as well as the “pecking order” chart, which ranks the people in your social circle based on the priority you attach to their emails and in what order you respond to them (users are portrayed as chickens in this one). There’s also a view called the “blow off scoreboard,” which shows users you routinely ignore, or send to someone else when they make a request.

The Digital Mirror software is a bit of a departure for Cataphora. The company’s speciality is analyzing email content as part of the forensic analysis done in court cases that involve an email trail. But it has been branching out recently into analyzing individual employees within organizations to determine who is the most productive, who are the slackers, and so on — which suggests that the rankings and suggestions made by its software are likely to be pretty close to the mark (I don’t use Outlook, so I can’t test it on my own correspondence). We may all instinctively know who we ignore at work, and who is located where in the corporate pecking order, but sometimes it’s useful to check those assumptions out, and Digital Mirror might be one way to accomplish that.

The software is part of a broader category of apps and services such as Rapportive (which works with Gmail), Xobni (an Outlook plugin that Cisco has invested in) and Xoopit (which Yahoo acquired), all of which look at your email contacts and pull dynamic info about them, as well as show you data about how many times you send messages to them, what attachments you included, etc. — and even how long it has been since you contacted someone, in the case of Etacts. What’s interesting about Cataphora’s software is that it goes a step further and tries to show your actual behavior towards people in your circle, with a view to revealing patterns you might not realize are even there.

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